Page 611 - Word Balloons

Author Notes:

I like that Pinkie's defining trait of randomness doesn't exclude her being, out of nowhere, incredibly perceptive and on-point. Maybe I'm starting to make a habit of writing her that way, but darn it it's just so much fun.

The first episode of our rotating-DMs slice-of-life alternate-universe campaign went up over the weekend. If you missed it, here are the links:
Mawlers Take Manehattan - Session 1 - Career Day: LibsynYouTube

67 Comments:

In the show Pinkie has had moments of really good perception and insight. Then there's the first Equestria Girls movie where pony Pinkie apparently had a hunch on what happened to Twilight across the dimensional barrier.

This is a fairly mundane example of Pinkie's Pinkieness. Really, she's just asking a question about the logical need for the event. It's one of those moments where you stop and think about why something trivial and everyday ever came about in the first place, like why handshakes were invented or some weirdo suddenly decided that certain shapes corresponded to sound.

Handshakes don't have anything to do with sleeves -- it's more to do with showing clearly that your right hand doesn't contain anything that could kill someone. I wouldn't be surprised if left-handed families traditionally shook with the other hand.

Pinkie arbitrarily breaks the fourth wall when the mood takes her. Like in an earlier episode this year, when the griffon says that just because she's going to help Rainbow Dash doesn't mean they're still friends... And Pinkie grabs the camera, pulls it over to her, and says, "Yes it dooooesss!!"

As I summarize it, she is far and away the smartest one of the Mane 6 - in terms of peak brilliance, as contrasted to Twilight's steady high output.

In this example, the leaves would eventually fall off if left to their own - see what happens in the Everfree Forest - but that's just not the pony way. Maybe they don't absolutely need to do the Running of the Leaves, but they want to. Besides, it makes the leaves all fall off at once so cleaning them up (getting them off the paths, etc.) can be done just once.

(Yes, manipulating nature to make life more convenient is the pony way. The same could be said of us; in many ways less extreme, but in some more so.)

The party walked over a platform in a dungeon that was supposed to drop away and dump the party into a pit 40 feet deep. The mechanism broke so it only dropped 3 inches. This was still enough of a jolt that the party needed to make a quick reflex save not to trip over.

How about fighting through a horde to fetch a seemingly unimportant trinket in a box, causing the minions to pursue more out of principle than out of strategic objective, only for the heroine to present the trinket to another PC as a birthday present? To her, that other PC was just that important. To the minions, that much effort for something that worthless was laugh-worthy.

When the present was finally unwrapped...well, to that other PC, more dakka and some minions (incapacitated by laughter) to test it on was a great birthday present.

Maybe she's asking why they don't let nature do the evolution thing? Let all the trees that don't shed leaves die, thereby only the trees that do shed their leaves prosper and the forest overall becomes one that doesn't need the Running of the Leaves event.

Strictly speaking, I'm pretty sure "The Running of the Leaves" was a Ponyville tradition, just like performing Winter Wrap-up without magic (although pegasi moving the clouds are still okay?). But this leads to questions like "Why do ponies get to control the sun and the moon?" "Why do ponies get to manufacture all the weather instead of it developing naturally?"

It's possible that Equestria really does function on a different natural level that requires magic for all these things we take for granted. Physics are hit-and-miss because MAGIC exists and operates under a different set of principles than anything we think of as natural. It might have some properties of energy, but it can clearly break or ignore certain boundaries.

The other answer might be just the opposite. Ponies have manipulated and manufactured natural occurrences and meddled with magic to the point where Equestria can't naturally perform these actions and it must all be done manually. Winter is literally billions of hoof-crafted snowflakes combined into a seasonal deluge of cold and wet, and requires water collected for weather-making purposes to be specially treated and preserved. At this point it may be as much necessity as convenience.

It's also possible that the planet Equestria is on is physically closer to the sun than one might expect. Or the sun is much, much smaller. Either of those might explain why Celestia is evidently able to manually control its position in the sky. That or her magic actually rotates the planet because there isn't a natural rotation for some reason. Either way, the result is a massive Celestial body under the apparent control of one being.

Well technically, the leaves have already turned brown, so they're not still trying to photosynthesize. Those leaves are dead. Being on the ground means that they can spend the winter decaying so that the trees can re-use their nutrients in the spring.

Maybe these trees have a symbiotic relationship with the ponies who signal the proper time to drop their dead leaves. Maybe this IS nature taking its course.

My answer'd probably been more along the lines of 'If the ponies didn't have a running-of-the-leaves, they'd drop off gradually over the course of weeks or even a couple of months. This way, they fall off more-or-less at a given day, we get a fun event, and you just need to sweep up once'

Could be one hundred... And just like that I can see the dice of the table being used for minis, depicting the entire race... Would be difficult for AJ and RD's players to miss that they're lagging so far behind, but tunnel vision happens.

This is a completely random thought, but I kinda wish that the Animators would include more guys in the background. I mean, you can't exactly have a world with a vast majority of mares, unless their mating habits are vastly different from ours (which they probably aren't, given the amount of married couples we have seen).

But then again, it us a show for little girls, and it tries to empower them by showing girls doing all these things. Still, I think more gender diversity would be cool, even if the guys never did anything major

I'm pretty sure Pinkie Pie is an eldritch horror whose body was hewn from the living bones of the First Reality as it was torn asunder in the creation of our current, extant universe. As such she exists outside of space-time as we know it, and thus is capable of things that she should not be. She is madness, insanity, joy, optimism, and of course, laughter. Her names are numerous and varied: The Opener of Ways and Means, Laughter Incarnate, the Pink Demon, the Wallbreaker, the Muse of Muses, She Who Laughs Last. For so long she wandered the void between stars, looking for companionship, until finally she found a world filled with colorful equines and then settled in.

In Equestria she has found a place that cheers her metaphysical heart, and more than enough friends to push away the crushing loneliness of eternity. This is why she reacts so badly—and so physically—to the mere idea of losing her friends, as her form is tied to her mental state. Woe be unto the being who pushes her to a breaking point, for beyond that they will find only their undoing. That she experiences any defeats is all part of the Game, the grand roleplaying she uses to blend in with other sapient beings, in the hope that they won't notice her differences too much if she remains something akin to mortal.

Such is the fate of the Great Pink One. But where others of the Old Gods would revel in their power, succumb to despair, or simply revert to a consuming fiend, she finds the challenge of her pseudo-mortal existence and the friendships she makes to be far more valuable. Her gifts to the mortal races are many; she whispers in the ears of artists and writers, fills the heart of dancers and musicians with verve and courage, and gives strength to those who would push back the boundaries of the Darkness, to venture forth and remake the world. She stokes the fires of divinity that exists in the souls of mortals, and uses their light to blind the Things That Should Not Be.

She also makes the best dang confections you'll ever taste. This may be due to the fact that she can literally pack more sugar and fat into such food products than can normally exist in such a small portion of normal space-time.

Other people have suggested she's the granddaughter of Loki - yes, the trickster god. He's known in actual mythology to have parented a horse, Sleipnir (long story). And since Pinkie in the show will say "Okie-Dokie-Lokie..."

This...oddly sounds like something I do from time to time. Though it's usually along the lines of "Why are you accusing us of stabbing the guard with a sword when none of us are carrying swords??" or "Why are you wearing your expensive outfit in a place you knew gets horribly muddy after it rained hard the night before??" than questioning why certain traditions keep happening. You know, the normal logical hiccups that pop up from time to time as you play an rpg with someone that usually makes it up as you go along.

Though there are times when we stumbled upon a town that has the odd tradition or habit and I find myself questioning why. Normally I don't get a logical answer for them, but it would be out of character for me to stop asking despite knowing this.

Many things don't make sense logically if you really think about it. It all comes down to precedent and tradition.

It's rare that someone will take the effort to sit down and make a system makes logical sense. And even when someone does, other people come along and mess it up with something because it's "more convenient".